http://www.brianmadden.com/forum/Welcome to Brian Madden.com Tech ForumAll rights reserveden-USbrian@brianmadden.comhttp://www.brianmadden.com/forumshttp://www.brianmadden.comTerminal Serviceshttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/103178We are a business (90 users) in Western Australia which has resulted from merging two companies that previously competed in the property sector. We provide property advice (valuations) to financial institutions. The two companies have existed for over 15 years. The new merged company launches soon.
4 offices spread out over 300 kilometres, all on a Tier 1 Managed VPN, but with 5 or 6 home users (and increasing numbers will work from home via ADSL). Three of the offices are limited to 1.5Mb AD SL due to lack of telco infrastructure. That said, the managed VPN highly optimises the ADSL.

We have two IT Admins (ie one from each company). Separately, neither of the companies has relied in the past on extensive use of Terminal Services, but we have used TS a small scale via MS Server 2003. For the new merged company, we have built a dual blade server using the Intel Modular Server system, running MS Server 2008. All users will use Terminal Services.

In other words, we are moving from fat clients to thin clients and want the transition to be as painless as possible for our users. We cant afford Citrix, but we can probably afford Provision Networks VAS or Ericomm WebConnect Enterprise. There is so much happening right now (literally, this month!) in the areas of virtualization and terminal services that our brains are about to burst just trying to assimilate the possible options?.

Our users comprise property valuers who use PDAs to collect valuation data (proprietary web connected software). Valuation reports are then completed in the offices. Workflows involve dictation, transcription and printing. We can change the dictation platform from fat clients to the PDAs, but that doesn?t resolve the issue of transcription (ie typing). So audio, typing and PDA Sync are big issues for us. File transfer between offices is also important.

I have reduced our options down to three: 1. MS TS 2008 with the free WebConnect, 2. MS TS 2008 with WebConnect Enterprise or 3. MS TS 2008 with Provision Networks VAS.

I?m leaning heavily towards Provision Networks VAS. Any suggestions, tips or pointers to comparative info would be really appreciated. Sales proposals are very welcome ? please email me via diggowestnet.com.au

Thanks,
Sean Diggins

PS We have a particular issue with respect to PDF workflows. We need all users to be able to create PDFs. In our testing, the fastest tool with the best compression (very important) has been FinePrint PDF Factory. However, we need full PDF Editing (with secure signature features and electronic form design) for 5 or 6 users. We cant really afford Acrobat and are struggling to assess alternatives. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Terminal Services]]>Sat, 04 Oct 2008 23:54:44 GMT103178Performance Tuning / Server Sizinghttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/103157
We are looking at deploying Office 2007 Professional Plus to our Citrix farm. I know Office 2007 to be quite heavy on memory usage, does anyone out there have any recommendations how much to allocate per user? for example 512MB per user or less?

Any thoughts much appriciated

GarethRead more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Performance Tuning / Server Sizing]]>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:10:16 GMT103157Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/102952I would use a different user so the schema would be different then our existing 4.0 one.

I know that Citrix states to use 9i or 10g, but they quote thats because 8i isn't supported by Oracle anymore.

I called Citrix tech support and didn't get a warm fuzzy when he said he was looking up the answer in the admin PDF on the www page.

I was told that it should probably work, but he had no clue.

Has anyone done this yet?

I really need to keep it in Oracle as we don't have any DBAs that know SQL and we don't want to use Access for fault tolerance.

--info--
My first servers going in will be Windows 2003 R2 SP2 64 bit.
Others will be a mix of Win2k3R2 32 and 64 bit to follow.Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:01:06 GMT102952Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/102673
Can you stream 32-bit apps to 64 bit XenAPP?

We have one application that requires a print driver installed. Can you stream print drivers?

Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Wed, 10 Sep 2008 09:06:56 GMT102673Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/102499http://community.citrix.com/blogs/citrite/sridharm/2008/09/04/XenApp+5+released+to+web!
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:46:05 GMT102499Terminal Serviceshttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/102400
I am in the process of testing our new 64bit 2003 Citrix PS 4.5 servers and could do with some advice regarding folder redirection. We have 4 Citrix servers which are going to be load balanced, hence the need for roaming profiles and folder redirection.

I have setup the appropriate AD loopback and OU's.

What I want to know is if there is any problem in using the same path for users desktop and my documents and different paths for the app data. Users may log on to a fat client(XP SP3) or use thin clients and I want their desktops and my docs to be the same. I presumed the app data would conflict between XP and 2003.

Is this the best way to do this? Or should the app data path be the same for the XP box and the 2003?

Anyone tried this, it seems to work for me!

Thanks

JohnRead more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Terminal Services]]>Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:58:58 GMT102400x64 Terminal Server / Citrixhttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/102362We are having issues getting our new citrix 64 bit servers to display the corporate background (Jpg). All our older 32bit servers display the background fine. All other policies are applied fine (such as folder redirection and office config). When you look at display properties the image is showing as if it is working fine.

Heres a list of things that i have already tried:

1) I have removed the server from the domain, deleted account and then re-added - (Still brings in all gp changes)
2) Checked permissions on image, changed image to another location
3) Changed image to BMP
4) added an 32 bit XP pc to the specific OU and it picked up all settings including background image.
5) removed all instances of wallpaper1.bmp from profiles and reboot.
6) added a local policy on the citrix server to point to wallpaper.

When you do a gpresult on the user profile it reports that it applies all the applicable group policies.
Also when you log on locally to the server as a user the wallpaper is downloaded.

Any Help is appreciated

Cheers Richard
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: x64 Terminal Server / Citrix]]>Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:02:20 GMT102362Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/102258
Situation:
I get a new Proliant Server with Windows 2003 64bit Standard Edition
The server will get 12 GB RAM.
I install some few application and we want to put this standalone server to the DMZ.
Only some few people from other countries will have access to this server and no sensitive data
will be placed to this server.
The easist way now to access it, is using the WebInterface which translates my external IP to my internal DMZ IP address. I used this last time with Citrix XP FR3, but since XenApp is different, I need to know
which ports in the DMZ firewall must be opend to have access. I don't plan to use a CSG. The installaion will be as easy as possible, but still should give some protection.

Can anybody tell me, which port in the DMZ for a XenApp without CSG I must keep open ?
Has anybody such a simple solution in place ?
Or would you recommend an other solution, maybe still to use a CSG ?

Thanks
Chris
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:50:51 GMT102258Profiles / User Environmenthttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/101811
I have set a path \\server\share\desktop to redirect DESKTOP and \\server\share\StartMenu to redirect STARTMENU in Group Policy which is applied to an OU where citrix server is nested to Authenticated users.

1. I have set GP to "Remove Common Program Groups From Start Menu" which of course remove items in "All User" profile and leaves items from the user profile. (unfortunatley ALL useful apps are missing now likes of Office etc)

2. I need to know how i could acomplish this folder redirections. i want to give access to users for published desktop i.e Ms Office, and few other programs, how do i do this?

3. I also want to know how to give access to users to certain applications in Start Menu.

In a nutshell i want users to see what i want them to see on the Desktop and on the Start Menu using GP!

Currently, they can only see basic stuff accessories and other microsoft standard etc...

Please can someone help me in a layman term as i have limited understanding of citrix and GP.

Thankyou very much!

Zaf

Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Profiles / User Environment]]>Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:22:41 GMT101811Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/101737
Since moving to four 8-core terminal servers (citrix win2003x64) we now see 100% cpu utilization much of the time with around 55 users. Four times the cores, not even twice the users.

I have moved the citrix servers into the same network as my exchange server to negate the netscreen's interference - no dice. I have removed the static port mappings on exchange and the GCs since they are no longer necessary without the firewall inbetween - no dice.

Any ideas? Could it be some interaction between outlook and x64 windows? Could it have been some outlook patch that is making it spin its wheels? It is taking users 20-25 seconds to open emails during these periods of spiking. External clients using rpc/http (in online mode) do not have this issue, and the Exchange server (also 8 core) isn't even breaking a sweat, so it seems to be something on the outlook side.

any ideas would be greatly appreciated, i'm losing a lot of sleep on this one!!

-Wes Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:32:25 GMT101737Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/101583
Does anyone else have same issue?
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:50:35 GMT101583Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/101543
However when it comes to the POP3 account, it has few cases.

1. Sends the emails fine no issues
2. Sends the emails after an error saying that "Your outgoing (SMTP) server does not support SSL -secured connections. If SSL -secured connections have worked in the past, contact your server administrator or ISP"
3. Same error message and doesn't send the email at all.

Adding more information are that if I setup the POP3 on the local PC that is not in the Citrix session both of the connections work under Outlook. But this does not resolve my issue where I must have users logged into the Citrix session.

Is there known issue that Citrix session doesn't pass SSL connection properly?Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Tue, 29 Jul 2008 01:57:10 GMT101543Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/101429I have some IBM beasts I want to use with 32gb of ram.
They are only running IE apps, and we get to 50 cc sessions and it wont let anymore on.

And yes, I know you can use 64bit, I already have 10 servers running a desktop like that!
But, the thing with 64 bit is lack of support.
The big killer is no 64bit Flash, and old Oracle jinitors and Java wont even install, so a lot of our IE apps have had to go as applications on 32bit servers

i've read the main articles here, but I reckon I should still be able to get 100+ users on beast like that

citrix 4.5Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:34:02 GMT101429Performance Tuning / Server Sizinghttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/100942
I am the currently looking into migrating my current 32bit environment to a 64bit environment with 32bit apps. My current environment is below. My initial plan was to use several DL 385's 2 AMD CPU Dual Core servers with 12GBs of RAM to accommodate about 180 users. Adding more memory will probably not be a problem but getting more servers will be - budget constraints. Given the data below, realistically, how many users could I support on one server with the given profile below?

Regards,

Ian

My Environment:

2 HP DL740G1 4 Xeon's, 16gb RAM, 2 RAID 1 Volumes (C: O/S, Page File, Spool Files) (D: User Profiles, Apps, Page File)

1 HP DL360 Pentium III Session Directory Server

O/S - Windows 2003 SP2
Applications - Microsoft Office & Navision (Microsoft ERP)

I average 80 users on each DL740 with current usage as follows:
75-80 users running Navision ERP
10-15 users running Outlook
2-5 users running Access
10-15 users running Work
10-15 users running Access
1-3 user running Powerpoint

Printer drivers installed include: HP LaserJets, Deskjets, Canon Inkjets, Xerox Work Centers/Document Centers

Performance statistics as follows:
totals
handles - 232475
threads - 5365
processes - 859

phyiscal memory
total - 16776448
available - 11050788
system cache - 2084900

kernel memory
total - 385628
paged - 323400
naonpaged - 61640

commit charge
total - 7663912
limit - 22467856
peak - 8149600

cpu - 10 - 30%

page file - 7gb

Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Performance Tuning / Server Sizing]]>Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:04:19 GMT100942Virtualization + Server-Based Computinghttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/100556
We are currently planning our Exchange Server 2007 system. I asked a few people at BriForum if they had any issues with running Exchange on XenServer. Nobody seemed to.

I was wondering if there was anyone who had any tips and who would be prepared to be a reference site, as my boss would like to speak to someone using Exchange in a virtualized environment.

Many Thanks

TomRead more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Virtualization + Server-Based Computing]]>Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:36:30 GMT100556Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/100544Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:39:34 GMT100544Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/100424
I have a ps4.5 farm with about 15 servers in it, mixed between x64 and x86. I have two x64 servers that do not show what application the user is using. It does show the name, username, session id, type, state, client name, and logon time, but the application field is blank. Both servers are x64 and have the same hotfixes installed as the others. Has anyone experienced this issue? Anyone have a resolution?

thanks,

JGRead more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:11:12 GMT100424Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/100116
I'm troubleshooting a performance issue with a CPS farm that was migrated from CPS 3.0 to a new farm with CPS 4.5. Migration was really just a rebuild of all apps on new servers to a new farm. The CPS 3.0 farm is really just a performance reference.

The user complain of performance issues, typing delays, and disconnects on the new farm.

Summary of environment:

- ASP environment - essentially just one published app and MS Word in use
- CPS 4.5 (HRP-02) 32-bit servers running a very few published apps on W2K3 R2 SP2 - all server builds identical
- Data center houses Dell M600 blade center used for CPS farm - (2) quad core processors, 16 GB RAM per blade (these servers are new to this CPS 4.5 farm, old CPS 3.0 farm was on older rack mount Dell servers)
- ICA sessions are established via a static ICA file and are load balanced using an F5 Big-IP load balancer with sticky sessions (persistence) enabled
- CPS servers (blade center) are in a DMZ along with file server cluster, AD DCs are on inside LAN.
- Appropriate ports have been opened between DMZ and inside LAN for AD authentication.
- Client PCs run web client and static ICA file is launched via a custom web portal (in other words, connections don't actually go through a WI server, instead all ICA sessions target a FQDN that resolves to the VIP of the Big-IP load balancer)
- Citrix UPD is used exclusively
- Folder redirection in place with redirection of My Docs and Desktop to share on clustered file server (FC SAN - Dell CX400)
- TS Roaming profiles in use, hundreds of users but only 200 concurrent users max load balanced across farm.

Initially, the farm was built out with 64-bit CPS 4.5 servers where the performance issues arose. There was a good deal of troubleshooting done and issues with Citrix UPD on 64-bit OS were resolved yet performance issues continued. At first, troubleshooting revealed a problem with network connectivity on the edge as not all users were complaining (appeared to be limited to high latency, low bandwidth connections on edge). However, turned out that more users began to complain even from remote locations that had low latency, high bandwidth pipes. Perf mon analysis revealed that local disk I/O was getting queued too often and % disk idle was too low - other counters (CPU, network I/O, paging, memory, etc) OK. Upgrade of firmware and drivers appeared to have resolved the local disk I/O issues (although M600 blades do not have write caching). Again, focus was network issues, so we put in place bandwidth restrictions via Citrix policy. Unfortunately, performance issues persisted. The old CPS 3.0 farm never exhibited these issues, but servers were not blades; however, the Big-IP was load balancing that farm too.

Client decided to rebuild the entire farm with 32-bit CPS 4.5 instead, blaming the published app. Unfortunately, the 32-bit farm is showing the same issues as the 64-bit farm was. One blade server removed from the VIP pool on the Big-IP and targetted directly (tweaked host file) showed no performance issues; however, the user count on that box was pretty low (only 25 users - long story). As before farm rebuild, CPS servers in the VIP pool are suffering from performance issues yet Perf mon analysis shows no issues.

Attention is focused again on network infrastructure - this time in the data center, but it's proving difficult to troubleshoot. Also, new Dell M600 blade servers are suspect, but it's not currently possible to directly target a blade server with 60 user sessions outside of the VIP pool of the Big-IP. The reason is that all user's reference the same ICA file that in turn references a public FQDN that resolves to VIP of the Big-IP, so targetting a single server requires inserting an entry in the host file on the client side to override the public DNS resolve. My client doesn't want to make these client side changes.

Ideally, I would like to get the Big-IP load balancer out of the equation by implementing a CSG/WI server; however, I don't think this will work with a static ICA file for launching sessions due to STA ticket expiry issues. So, my client cannot abandon the use of the static ICA file launching the app for now as users are accustomed to launching published app via web portal and AD credentials are embedded within the ICA file (not secure, I know).

Help!!!

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:45:10 GMT100116Scripting / Automationhttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/99604
What I like to do is to start an Internet Explorer with fixed width and height etc according to this script:

et objExplorer = WScript.CreateObject _
("InternetExplorer.Application", "IE_")
objExplorer.Navigate2 "http://www.test.com"
objExplorer.Visible = 1
objExplorer.ToolBar = 0
objexplorer.addressbar = 0
objExplorer.StatusBar = 0
objExplorer.Width=1035
objExplorer.Height = 792

This works ok - but it will only start the x64 version of IE not the x86 version which I want.
Obviously I'm on W2K3 x64 edition, running PS4.
The reason for me to use the x86 version of IE is that we are having various problems with the x64 version, such as window popups and so forth.

So I am wondering if anybody has any solution to this?

ThanksRead more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Scripting / Automation]]>Fri, 23 May 2008 06:20:17 GMT99604Citrix Presentation Server / XenApphttp://www.brianmadden.com/Forum/Topic/99449
Applied registry keys from MS KB 941158 and IE branding and time reduced.

Logged logon process at userenv.log and could see delay in running autoexec.bat. Created a autoexec.bat file with minimal text (rem and exit) gave authenticated users permissions to file and logons improved but still seeing times over 20 seconds.

15 seconds now at running logon screen. From Userenv.log delay in running userinit.exe file.

USERENV(518.1d48) 14:43:14:937 LibMain: Process Name:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe
USERENV(1d5c.1d68) 14:43:29:625 LibMain: Process Name:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe

Servers fully patched for OS and Citrix Rollup 2 and patches 7, and 8.

Any ideas?

Thanks

JL
Read more:Group: Tech Support ForumsForum: Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp]]>Sun, 18 May 2008 23:57:35 GMT99449